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From Bruce Boettcher:

Just discovered this site
today and hope to visit it often. I haven't researched this
deeply, but I would respectfully question your use of usages. Am
I correct that the English language has slowly been converting -age
words from collective nouns to objective ones? We now use garage,
message and package as individual objects. Weren't they
originally collections or distributions of gar (covering, as in
garment), mess (things sent, as in missive and
mission) and packs?

I suppose the change is inevitable, but when I hear of fruitages
rather than fruits and usages rather than uses,
something stirs uncomfortably inside. If farmers put hay in two barns,
do they have forages or do two passenger ships have steerages?
I may be wrong, but I think not.

This observer would like to see a slowing of the trend. Who agrees or
disagrees? I am eager to hear more.

First, let us suggest that any
readers who would like to discuss this further consider going to
http://www.takeourword.com/blog1
and posting your comments to the new Take Our Word For It blog. You'll
see our (TOWFI staff's) entries, including an entry regarding this issue of
the webzine (Issue 200). Any discussion regarding this issue,
including regarding this particular letter, can be posted there. Of
course, you may also write us via e-mail and see if we post your reply in
next issue's Sez You column. In the future you may access the blog
from the table of contents in our
home
page.

Now to Bruce Boettcher's letter.
The word usage as a noun dates back to the 14th century, and our
sense is recorded in the late 17th century. The plural form dates from
1473. We do agree that one should be careful in using the plural form,
however.

Fruitages
dates from the 17th century. So the practice has been around for a
while. As for other -age endings,
especially the ones you cite (garage, message), the ending was
attached in French or other Romance languages, not English. Package
is the exception and was formed in English from pack + -age,
though it dates from the 16th century. Garage and message were
never collective nouns, per se. Garages and messages
have always been correct. Package, on the other hand, was
originally the name of a privilege of the City of London, and in that sense
it was not pluralized, but when the word came to refer to the items that
were the subject of the privilege (packages of cloth and other goods), the
plural form arose. Also, it is not formed from the noun pack
but from the verb.

As an
aside, the gar- in garment does not come from the same root as
the gar- in garage. But we'll save that discussion for
another time.

We're
pleased that you enjoy the site!

From Zayd Abdulla:

Some more good news, in
case none of the Beeb-watching TOWFI subscribers
have drawn your attention to it, yet:

Yes, do check out the BBC's
site about their Word Hunt. We intend to submit our ideas on a few
words.

From Sandy Staat:

I have a thought on the
butterfly word... The monarch butterflies need to make their cocoons on
the milkweed plant, which is quite abundant in the [American] Midwest.
The sap of this plant is a sticky, thick white substance. It is a staple
of the Monarch caterpillar's diet. Milk = butter, thus perhaps
butterfly?

As tidy as that sounds, it is unfortunately
not the source of the insect's name. The word butterfly has
been around since Old English was spoken, but the milkweed is a New World
plant, and, as
recent genetic research shows, the monarch butterfly evolved in the New
World, too and only spread to other parts of the world after the European
entry into North America and the spread of milkweed out of the New World.

From Camille (not Kamille):

A problem which afflicts
me with more pain than a thousand festering boils is the constant misuse
of the letters K, Z, and X. Increasingly, I am seeing K , especially on
signs, where there should be a C. One example is the "Konfident Kids"
establishment near my neighborhood. Every time I drive by, I mean to
look at the sign to see what, exactly, the nature of the work done there
is. Every time I drive by, I get so angry about that misplaced K that I
don't look at the rest of the sign. I'm pretty sure that it is some
pediatric practice, as there is a large stethoscope around the words "Konfident
Kids." Don't you think that if one can't spell confident correctly,
there is no way that you could get into medical school? There are many
other examples I could give, and the connection between them is that
they are all supposed to be rather "cutesy" things for the kiddies, or
are denoting that your "krab" is imitation. I foresee that in the near
future K will replace C entirely, and the poor people named Kharles or
Kheryl will have to explain that the odd pronunciation of their name is
rather like the sound in the pedantic, old-school way spelling of whikh.

As we move on to the next letter of interest, Z, I would like to point
out that this is most often misused either in teenager's e-mail or in a
product that is supposed to look "kool," such as Kidz Bop.(Notice the
lack of apostrophe as well.) This usage probably arose from the
pronunciation of the pluralizing S in many words. It also looks, to me,
incredibly incredibly ugly. S is one of the most elegant-looking letters
in the English language. If the participants in this butchery of plurals
were involved in some kind of radical phonetic spelling reform I would
not mind, but I fear, alas, that they are not.

Another example of this mangled pluralization error is X in the place of
-ks, -kes, -cs, etc. I almost understand this error; it makes sense in
the twisted way that the misused Z does. It is still inexcusable. I
cringe every time I see it. I correct the perpetrator of this spelling
crime every chance I get. Still it persists!

Mike and Melanie, thank you for creating Take Our Word For It,
which is a truly brilliant magazine. I enjoy reading the Words to the
Wise section, the ever-humorous Laughing stock, and most especially, the
Curmudgeons' Corner.

Well, in the "Konfident Kids"
example, clearly the idea is to provide some visual alliteration, though
that doesn't make it any cuter. We agree that this is an overused
advertising device. The Z and X usages are also annoying, we agree,
but we can only hope they are both simply fads, much like purposefully
misspelling words was a fad in the mid-19th century.

From Bill Clark:

I am
distressed that people are adding able to words that
heretofore would have been phrased "ability to [do something]," for
example, reachable, is that a word? Or is this an example of
our language evolving? Doable, do-able?

Well,
doable dates from 1449 in the written record, believe it or not!
Reachable turns up in 1633. As we mentioned in
this week's Curmudgeon's Corner, it is
human nature to, perhaps on the spur of the moment, create a word using
a pattern that exists in other words. We know that adding -able
to the end of the word will create a new word that, though perhaps
clumsy, will get our point across more quickly and efficiently than
searching for an existing word. Yes, as curmudgeons we don't
always like that, but such is life!

This is a US Army M79 grenade launcher (first issued in 1961), an
anti-personnel weapon generally called a bloop gun or blooper
during the war in Vietnam - not the bazooka of WWII and Korean
War, which was the slang term for the rocket launcher, M1A1 and
its later variants (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bazooka).

My son has become a
vegetarian so I have started to read up on it. I find it really odd that
the Vegetarian Society could be so wrong about the origin of the name of
the org and you (I don't have time to check out your credentials) could
be so right. What gives?

We don't really have a
response to that except that you might be amazed what people and
organizations don't know about themselves. Do you know where your
surname comes from? We know what some of the possibilities are: that
it is English and was the name for a box maker or chest maker (from case
"container"); that it is Provençal and related to the Spanish/Italian
surname Casa "house," thought to have applied to those living
in the best house in the village (the English surname House is said to have
arisen in the same manner*); or that it is the Italian name for a cheese
maker or seller.

As for vegetarian, we
researched and attempted to find the earliest occurrence of the word and
analyze its context. We found that the word first turns up in 1839 in
the U.S. (while the Vegetarian Society was founded in England). We do
not know what the Vegetarian Society did to come up with its explanation of
the word's origin, but they clearly did not go back beyond 1847, which is
the date they claim they invented the word. However, we will not argue
with the assertion (though not made by you) that the Vegetarian Society
popularized the word.

*as in Dr. Gregory House of
the U.S. television series House starring English actor Hugh
Laurie (he does a superb American accent!).

From Michael Sousa:

A note about one of your
articles:

When discussing the
history of English, linguists speak of three major periods. Old English
is the language of the Anglo-Saxons which was spoken between 600 and
1100. It was entirely Germanic, had inflected endings (like Latin) and
had five genders.

English did not have five
genders. English did have (and continues to have) three genders:
masculine, feminine, and neuter. I believe that you were thinking of
"declensions" rather than "genders."

No we weren't. When we said
"genders" we meant "genders". If you would like to investigate Old English
in more depth, the University of Calgary offers
an excellent
course online. If you just want to read up on the five genders (weak
feminine, strong feminine, weak masculine, strong masculine and neuter), you could
skip to
the relevant lesson.